Stackdriver Scooped Up by Google in Cloud-Monitoring Deal

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Another promising technology startup, another acquisition by a West Coast giant.

In a busy week for Boston tech deals, this one stands out: Stackdriver, a two-year-old company working on cloud-application monitoring, is being acquired by Google. Terms of the deal weren’t given, but Google product manager Tom Kershaw says in a blog post that Stackdriver is joining the search giant’s cloud platform team.

“Stackdriver has built a leading service to help developers intelligently monitor the apps and services they’re building and running in the cloud. This allows customers to have more visibility into errors, performance, behavior, and operations,” Kershaw writes. “The teams are going to be working to integrate Stackdriver’s great functionality so that Google Cloud Platform customers can take advantage of these new advanced monitoring capabilities.”

That makes the deal sound less like a talent acquisition and more like a product integration—though we’ll see about that.

Google’s other recent acquisitions in the Boston area include ITA Software and Boston Dynamics. The Stackdriver buy might help Google compete better with Amazon on the cloud-computing front.

Another key team member is Phil Jacob, who is no stranger to big-company acquisitions. Jacob’s previous startup, StyleFeeder, was bought by Time in 2010.

Stackdriver raised $15 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners. The investors confirmed the deal but declined to comment on the specifics, so it’s hard to know how good an outcome it is, or what the cash-stock breakdown is. The Stackdriver team hasn’t responded to requests for comment.

It’s worth pointing out that early Stackdriver investor Ben Nye—with Bain Capital Ventures, and now CEO of VMTurbo—has a strong track record in application performance management. He previously invested in dynaTrace (acquired by Compuware), AppNeta, and other related companies.

One response to “Stackdriver Scooped Up by Google in Cloud-Monitoring Deal”

For what its worth, I think this is a smart move by Google. I know that many organization are looking to deploy out into AWS and to a lesser extent Azure and Compute Engine.

I think the challenge faced by cloud only monitoring solutions is they miss a huge hole, which is the hybrid environment. Organizations, from what I am hearing and seeing, are looking to deploy workloads to the public cloud but more piecemeal and want to be able to see and decide, which workloads are best for which environments.

If you are interested in monitoring hybrid environments you might want to check out ScienceLogic and their built-in CloudMapper. They monitor more AWS services than any solution and the market, also cover the complete IT stack on-prem as well. They also automatically map the cross-technology dependencies amongst AWS services and between AWS and on-prem resources.